Torn
by cissyalice
Summary: "Later, she will think of a story her mother once told her. Of a girl who opened a box that should never have been opened. And all the horrors that came out, never to be put back." - Snapshots of Ava's life, before and after Thanos. Guest appearances from Bucky and Natasha.
1. Chapter 1

**_A/N:_** ** _Wow, can't believe I actually wrote something. I've been away for a while so my writing probably sucks at the moment as I am way out of practice but whatever the muse wouldn't leave me alone._**

 ** _Full disclosure, this started off as a character study of Ava and devolved into a kind of self-therapy. I loved Ava's character (not just because it's Hannah John-Kamen and I totally have a thing for taking messed up characters and making them my children) but because I felt represented by her in a way. There aren't a lot of characters out there who deal with chronic pain and flashy marvel superpowers aside that is what she's suffering from. Like Ava, my pain started when I was a child and it's been there all the time ever since. Of course, I'm pretty sure having your cells torn apart and put back together every day might be a little more painful than what I'm dealing with but I digress. So some of Ava's thoughts, feelings and experiences in this story are inspired by my own life. In saying that, this is in no way a self-insert. Ava and I are very different people who have had vastly different experiences and that's shaped who we are._**

 ** _Also be warned, I have been watching a lot of Killjoys lately (if you haven't seen this show what the hell are you doing with your life?) and some of my Dutch might accidentally slip into my Ava in later chapters, so yeah._**

 _"When the nights were long and the days were deep_

 _There lived a girl and her father in a beautiful castle."_

 _"Was he a king? I like when they're kings."_

 _"He wanted to be._

 _Sometimes he thought he was._

 _He was on a quest to feed his people._

 _But he had disturbed something old, deep, deep under the land._

 _All gifts come with a price._

 _The girl's father had awoken an ancient darkness, something in search of a name, a voice, and without knowing it, he gave it one. . ."_

 _\- Killjoys: Season 3, Episode 10_

 _..._

She's six years old, the first time they're introduced.

Oh, don't get her wrong. They've crossed paths before, strangers brushing each other on the street, glimpses in the crowd, quick and forgotten. The ache of bone stretching through tender, fleshy gum - faded from memory almost as soon as it's passed; a bump of the head against a table leg, tears of surprise and cries for the arms that will pick her up and make it all go away; a scraped knee, stinging long after impact and hobbling her step for days - more from remembered hurt than anything that lingers after; a hoarse throat, cramping stomach and clogging nose that keep her home from school for a full, dreaded week...

But these are nothing. In a few months, a year, she won't even remember them. The only traces left behind little more than a vague wariness of certain circumstances, a preparedness for when they might come again. It is a taste.

Six changes that.

But isn't that what aging is all about? Change.

(if so she is quite the master at it, constantly metamorphosing, becoming uglier and uglier with each evolution - the reverse butterfly)

Her parents are fighting, again. She can hear them from all the way down the stairs, down the hall, down into their new living where she sits on their new couch in their new house, in their new neighborhood, in their new country (everything so new). Shouts and silences and shouts again, pitching anger that make her clench inward and her stomach scream.

She mistakes its protests for hunger.

Perhaps it is. It's been a long time since that sandwich, after all, the one she nibbled at distractedly for afternoon tea, shying from the ever present tension in the room.

She knows something is wrong. Has been for a long time. Ever since that day her father came home, big and small all at once, angry and sad, desperate and broken. She knows it has something to do with a shield, not like her Captain America one that she runs around the back yard with, slinging at Hydra soldiers left and right. A different one, bigger, scarier. And there's a 'Hank', the word she and Mummy never say but hear too much, a word that is bad like 'shit' and 'crap' and 'ass' - words she's not supposed to know. And there are long nights she sits in her father's lap ( _'can't sleep, Daddy, just a few more minutes', 'not yet, Daddy, please_ _')_ and stares without understanding at paper after paper strewn across his desk, scribbles of nonsense that might have been pictures and might have been words, as his desperation with the pencil grows and grows - because she knows that he needs her, even if he's never said it, and so she'll stay with him until he doesn't (like the seven dwarfs keeping their vigil around Snow White's bedside, waiting for her to awake and return to herself once more). And then there's the fighting. Like now. She didn't know what fighting was until her father came home that night and she would give anything to return to the days when she didn't, to go back to those few seconds before he walked in the door, further even, to that morning when he kissed Mummy on the mouth - icky but good - and lifted her up above his head, sprinting around the kitchen to give her wings so she could fly like The Wasp.

(she laughed so hard, not knowing she would never feel that bubble in her chest so full again)

But that was then, and this is now.

Now, she is hungry.

She doesn't want to bother the voices upstairs, though, doesn't want their anger turned on her, to feel the rage of that fire up close - she knows from experience how it can scorch. Besides, she's a big girl. She can get her own dinner.

Stepping into the kitchen, she looks around, a little lost, a little desperate.

She doesn't know how to make a sandwich yet and doesn't really want one besides. There's macaroni and cheese in the cupboard but you need a bowel for that and they're all up too high for her to reach - she tries, stretching, stretching, just a little farther . . . but no. She settles for an apple. She likes apples.

Only, she doesn't like them whole.

Doesn't like the way biting into them tears at her gums and makes them sting - for as little as she knows of pain, she is keen to avoid any trace of it. Doesn't like the sticky juice dribbling down her fingers. Mummy or Daddy always cut them into wedges for her but Mummy and Daddy aren't here, and she's a big girl.

She gets a knife from the top drawer - the biggest one, the sharpest one, the one most capable of defeating the hard, stubborn apple - and grabs a breadboard from the dish-rack - she's also a smart girl. She steadies the apple with her fingers, glaring down at it, concentrating, chewing her bottom lip as she balances the knife somewhere over the center. It wobbles around, changing, changing, changing, slipping, slipping, slipping. Twice she loses purchase the apple escapes, bouncing off the breadboard onto the floor. On the third try she doesn't hesitate, impatient, determined, she slams the knife down. It works, to a point. It gets halfway through to the core until her strength gives out, unable to make it go any further. She takes a breath, pushes down - nothing. Annoyed, she tries to free the knife and try again. Nothing. Stuck. She pulls with a little more effort, groans and yanks.

She almost doesn't register the pain.

Not at first.

Instead she sees the blood, the red drops falling onto mangled apple and sticky breadboard and, as she flinches back, tiled floor (she didn't mean to make such a mess, she didn't!). Eyes wide, she raises her free hand, index finger and palm leaking more of the scary liquid. She can feel it now. A sharp, searing throb, emanating from a small slice at the bottom of her index finger.

(pain takes her hand and squeezes.

It is not a nice hello)

She screams.

And cries.

And screams again, her other hand still clutching the knife, forgotten, unable to relax her grip and let it go.

She's not sure if it's the pain or the fear that gets her most.

Because she knows, knew even before she opened the drawer, that she's not supposed to touch the knives.

And now there's blood and mess and pain and everything is her fault.

(it's all her fault)

And she doesn't know what to do. Doesn't see a way out.

But then her parents are there, voices still raised but this time with fear and concern, and they are looking at her and only her, and she is in their arms and in their minds like she hasn't been in months. She hurts and she is scared, but she is not alone. Not anymore.

So she does not mind it so much. This hand of pain that reaches out for hers to shake. The way their skin touches and the sharp unfamiliarity begins to fade. It is not the worst of meetings, as meetings go. Perhaps, the next time It comes, It will not scare her so much.

(if ever there was proof that she was once a child, a real child that didn't fade, that believed in fairy tales and happy endings, a child of innocence - it is this)

How could she have ever been so naive?

. . .

Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. The machine is angry and Daddy is shouting and Mummy is shouting and now they are running, her legs stumbling after taller, longer strides, a hand pulling her along. It is only when they breach the doorway andkeep going, that she realizes there are only two of them, that the only hand upon her is soft and delicate, not huge and calloused and she turns just to see, just to know, because he has to be there, just behind, just a few steps behind. Because he is her dad and in all these years of running they have never ran without him; because heroes never leave people behind, and heroes always make it out; because her dad is a hero (she _knows_ he is, in the same way she knows that The Hank is a villain) and so is she, he told her so, he told her that she was as brave and powerful as The Wasp and she believes him because he knew her (once upon a time in a land far, far away) and he would never lie to her.

He would _never_ lie to her.

Yes, heroes always make it out.

But sometimes heroes need help.

And heroes never leave people behind.

So she tugs free, wishes there was time to tell her mother that it would all be okay, that she will get Daddy, that she will save him, that they will all make it out. But there isn't and the machine is getting angrier - she can hear its screams - and so instead she just runs, hears a different scream behind her, too scared to be Mummy's (mummy's don't get scared); and then she is through the door and her father is there and she's coming for him, she's coming, almost there. It's all going to be okay-

But then he turns and she sees his face and she knows, she should have remembered.

Should have remembered that Steve Rogers once left Bucky Barnes behind in the snow, because there is no saving what is already lost.

Should have remembered that Captain America flew into the ice and never came back.

Should have remembered that Ant-Man no longer has his Wasp.

But she didn't. And everything is pain and roaring and heat and nothing.

Later, she will think of a story her mother once told her. Of a girl who opened a box that should never have been opened. And all the horrors that came out, never to be put back.

...

 _"Yale, you must remember the stories I tell you, especially this one."_

 _"It's important."_

 _"Why?"_

 _"Because, Little Bird, this is how it all began."_

 _\- Killjoys: Season 3, Episode 10_

 ** _A/N: I've written a lot more but it's going through the proofreading stages so hang in there._**

 ** _side note: I was halfway through writing the apple/parents fighting thing when I realized that I was recounting something that actually happened to me as a child._**


	2. Do you know what it's like to be unmade?

**un** **·make**

tr.v _._ un·made, un·mak·ing, un·makes

 _\- to cause to disappear : destroy_

 _\- to deprive of essential characteristics : change the nature of_

* * *

The shield comes for her and she was wrong, it is not a shield like the melted plastic in the burnt remains of the home that wasn't home. It is people with white coats like doctors, people with guns that hide beneath the black of bulky uniforms, people in suits; it is a pirate without wooden leg or parrot, who crouches down in front of her, a wolf playing at being a sheep for the little lamb, and tells her they are going to help her (she doesn't know yet that lies extend beyond 'yes I brushed my teeth' and 'no I didn't push Tommy Dickson into the mud, he slipped, it was just a slip'; doesn't know that promises aren't made to be kept); it is building after building after building, different states and different countries, but always the same antiseptic rooms, and beds that aren't covered with unicorns or superheroes or anything kind; it is white rooms with glass walls, choked with white shrouded people who touch her with a briskness and detachment that is somehow worse than the hands that grab at her arms and squeeze too hard when she doesn't want to come, when she runs (it's the only times anyone tries to touch her, the girl who is never quite solid enough to hold); it is an eagle in a circle that follows her wherever she goes, watching, judging, the only real thing that never leaves her; it is-

But, of course, S.H.I.E.L.D. is not S.H.I.E.D. at all - though this she will learn later, much later. It is a shiny red apple hiding a rotten core, teeming with maggots and disease. It is a skull with arms like the kraken of myth, coiling around a shield, again and again, squeezing and squeezing as its prey grows ever shorter of breath, all until its ribs crack under the pressure and life snuffs out; it is the many heads that are destroyed and reborn, always reborn; it is men and women who strap her to a chair and never flinch at the screams; it is the words 'target' and 'terminate' and the faces of dead men and women that come at her in her sleep (if she ever sleeps, if the pain ever lets her, if the ever-present exhaustion defeats it at last), men and women who were once more alive than her and are now dead because of her, dead in a way that she might never be.

It is her life and her hell and her family and her prison.

It is her unmaking.

There is a man sometimes, not like the others. A man half metal, half ice - empty where she is full _(always full, always too much)_ , cold where she is hot. A toy they take out and seal away, pull apart and put back together, almost as much as they do her. He looks at her like he has seen the likes of her before, only cannot remember where (little girls made of fear and pain and everything mean; who don't flinch under the hits, or blink at the blood that grows and grows on their tiny little girl hands). Sometimes they put them in a room together.

They want to see how strong she is. How far their little windup toy has come.

How far they still have to push her.

 _Unmake_ her.

(farther - the answer is always farther)

And even though she leaves the room with new cuts and bruises each time without fail, she thinks she likes this best, out of all the things S.H.I.E.L.D. has her do. Because he is the first person since Dr. Foster to look at her as something other than a cell under a microscope, to not see the strings nailed to her limbs and wonder at just which ones to pull and how _(how, how, oh, how will we make her dance today?_ ). Dr. Foster looked at her like she was a real girl. The Ice-Man looks at her like she is nothing and that is almost as good. Sometimes, it is better.

And what are cuts and bruises or even broken bones when every cell inside her is an agony that can never be soothed. She even grows to like them, in a way. They distract from the real pain.

She is always hot, always sweating, burning. Someday she thinks that she will burn away, heat searing through her bones, through her flesh until there is nothing but ash to fade away into nothing (she is _always_ fading). It might be a relief, a freedom from this never-ending purgatory of here and not here, this pain (the only part of her that _won't_ fade), if some part of her didn't fear that she would go on burning forever. That even when she is gone, never here but always there, the pain will not go with her.

There is no way to know, after all.

She is very ' _special_ _'._

The only one of her kind.

They say it like she should be proud, grateful even, but all she feels is resentment and disgust. Towards them, towards herself, towards this thing inside of her, towards whatever or whoever decided that _this_ would be her role to play in the universe. That little Ava Starr wasn't going to be like all the other little girls, no she was meant for bigger things, greater things. She was meant to _be_ a thing. A special thing but a thing nonetheless.

She never asked for this.

And, underneath it all, she feels alone.

Not just because her world consists mostly of sterile facilities and people who can never care for her; or that her closest relationship is with a man who can never remember her, a man who leaves bruises, split lips and broken bones as parting gifts; a man who is more of a thing than even her.

It is a different brand of loneliness. The kind that forms with the realization that there is no-one, not a person in the world, who is like you, who can understand you. There is a wall around her, not of her own making, cutting her off from the rest of humanity and sometimes . . .

Sometimes she just wishes that something could happen, that someone could phase through that wall and join her on the other side, share with her this special, special place.

How horrible.

To wish this suffering upon another just to soothe her own wretched loneliness.

(she will wish and do far more horrible things than this)

But it's a pointless wish. There are none like her, there never will be, at least as far as she can see. If her employers (owners) are capable of making more of her, they would have, a dozen times over. And out of everyone, they seem the ones most likely to have the skills and resources for the job.

Fortunately or unfortunately, she is an accident.

And it's hard to replicate those, no matter how special.

* * *

 **tear**

v. tore, torn, tear•ing, n. v.t.

 _\- to pull apart or in pieces by force; rend._

 _\- to produce by rending_

...

 **A/N: little guest** **appearence by our Winter Soldier in this chap, also slight reference to the Red Room. I'm keeping in Bucky's connection to the Red Room and Natasha that happened in the comics even though that seems to be something they've discarded from the movieverse because I always liked that part of their histories.**


	3. The Price of My Soul

"To kill the monster, you become the monster."

 _\- Alicia Clark, Fear the Walking Dead_

. . .

The first time she kills someone it is an accident. She's in the room again, training. Not with the Ice-Man - like her he is one of a kind and is only brought out on special occasions. No, in this room there are men and women, taller and bigger and more human than her. Some of them she recognizes from previous sessions, most she doesn't. They are not like her.

A punch flies at her, aiming for the side of the head-

She is gone.

And back again in a moment, out of range of the fist and safe for a time at the other end of the room.

She is not afraid to be hit. It is part of the training. And nothing can hurt her the way her body hurts itself. But she knows that's not what they want. That the punches are supposed to miss. That she is supposed to get better. That she is supposed to hit back and not miss.

She is supposed to win.

And she's found it's easier to do what she's supposed to.

Besides, they are still the only ones who can fix her.

 _(promises, promises)_

They haven't cured her yet.

She doesn't think they will.

But if she doesn't do what she's supposed to do, she _knows_ they won't.

A man comes at her, she phases, runs forward, intending to run through and past him, out of danger. But something goes wrong a second in. It's unpredictable, you see, so unpredictable. The suit may help her control it but only to a point. And there are always surprises. She never quite knows when she's going to fade out; or in.

As is the case, this time.

Her cells harden and bones shatter - not her own for once. She hears them break, the sound bringing back memories of the branches her mother would snap to make mock arrows and swords for her to play with (she shakes them away - mothers have no place in the room). A squelch. The world around her is hotter than she remembers. And wetter.

Someone yells.

She fades out again.

And in.

This time she is a meter away, her suit is no longer pristine white. Her torso and arms are covered in a thick, wet red, like paint but darker, hotter. She turns around and It is on the floor. The thing. What remains of the man she's torn apart from the inside. It's no longer together, not completely. A torso here, a limb there. Intestines stripped and split apart.

It is a monstrous, monstrous thing.

She should feel horror. And perhaps she does.

But most of all she feels vindication.

Because this, this mess on the floor, this scene of gore,

this is how she pictures herself every day. When there are no mirrors to lie to her. When she doesn't look down at the body that once belonged to her and see whole, stitched together flesh. When she closes her eyes, not one part of her is whole or together. Not a part of her is human and alive.

When she closes her eyes all she sees is the physical representation of her pain, the way she should _really_ look after being torn asunder day after day, year after year, hazardously fixed _(not fixed, never fixed)_ back together seconds before another rupture - how can that not scar?

She looks at this dead man on the floor and wants to point, to shout. _See! See? Now do you see? This is what I am, this is all that remains. I am this mess you grimace and look away from. I am this man._

But she doesn't and they don't.

And as she's escorted out of the stained room, training over for the day, she can't help but envy him, this man she's killed.

His pain, terrible as it was, came and went in an instant; but his colleagues saw and will remember the evidence of it for the rest of their lives.

Her pain, all the more terrible, comes and never goes. It will never be over. And no-one will ever see it but her.

. . .

A week after that, they take her out of the compound. It's not the first time. She's been on missions before. There is always something to steal, some sort of intelligence to be gathered. But it is the first time she will kill for them, on purpose. They don't give her a gun. They've seen that she doesn't need one. The target is a middle-aged woman with unremarkable features, the kind no-one ever remembers _(she will never forget)_. She knows nothing about her other than where she will be and how much of a threat she might pose in fight (none at all).

Hero or villain.

Guilty or innocent.

They don't tell her and she doesn't ask.

It's simple, easy, over in nine minutes.

She hates every second of it.

(she doesn't)

Everything changes for her that day.

And nothing does.

. . .

She can't remember what she wanted to be, once upon a time. If she wanted to be anything at all;

('a _hero_ _'_ , a voice whispers - but no, she won't think about that)

if she had plans or dreams.

What do little girls want to be when they grow up?

TV, when she's allowed access, says princesses and singers, and actresses and models; or more sensibly at times, vets, doctors, lawyers.

There is so much to be.

All she really wants to be is free.

Of the pain. Of the fear. Of the being real and not being real.

Of the shield, and the tests, and the blood that she almost doesn't see anymore, climbing its way up her arms like poisonous vines. What happens when it reaches the top? When there is nothing left of her for it to swallow?

(the first time she sees a photo of Hope van Dyme, with her perfect hair and her perfect clothes and her living father and her _freedom,_ something boils at the center of her chest, something nasty and unfamiliar, not quite rage, not like the hatred and bitterness she feels towards the father but something else. Something more nauseating.

She stares and she feels and she knows.

Envy.

 _'You_. I could have been you.

I should have been you.'

She closes the dossier, slamming it shut on the feeling before it can breed with the anger inside her and trigger something _reckless_ )

None of that is possible.

What she is, what she's going to become, what she will always be,

is a weapon.

They make sure of it.

And if she is a very good one, the best,

Maybe just maybe, she'll be a weapon without pain.

What is a soul worth, after all, if she can't even feel it underneath all that _pain?_

…

"To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else."

― _Bernadette Devlin McAliskey_ _,_ _The Price of my Soul_


End file.
